193 
THE WHITE WHALE 
fluential with him. It would be refining too much, perhaps, even con- 
sidering his monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness towards the 
White Whale might have possibly extended itself some degree to all 
sperm whales, and that the more monsters he slew by so much the more 
he multiplied the chances that each subsequently encountered whale 
would prove to he the hated one he hunted. But if such a hypothesis 
he indeed exceptionable, there were still additional considerations 
which, though not so strictly according with the wildness of his ruling 
passion, yet were by no means incapable of swaying him. 
To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used 
in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order. He 
knew, for example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some re- 
spects was over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the complete 
spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves intel- 
lectual mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but 
stand in a sort of corporeal relation. Starbuck’s body and Starbuck’s 
coerced will were Ahab’s, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck’s 
brain ; still he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred 
his captain’s quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself 
from it, or even frustrate it. It might be that a long interval would 
elapse ere the White Whale was seen. During that long interval Star- 
buck would ever be apt to fall into open relapse of rebellion against his 
captain’s leadership, unless some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial 
influences were brought to bear upon him. Hot only that, but the 
subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more signif- 
icantly manifested than in his superlative sense and shrewdness in fore- 
seeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped of 
that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested it; that 
the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure 
background (for few men’s courage is proof against protracted medita- 
tion unrelieved by action) ; that when they stood their long night 
watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of 
than Moby Dick. For however eagerly and impetuously the savage 
crew had hailed the announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all 
sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable — they live in the vary- 
ing outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness — and when retained 
for any object remote and blank in the pursuit, however promissory of 
